United Nations pilots "SDG Chat" with Accenture and OICT to make SDG resources easier to find

Panelists at the SDG Media Zone at United Nations headquarters in New York described "SDG Chat," an AI‑powered chatbot built by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs with technical partners Accenture and the UN Office of Information and Communications Technology to make materials about the 17 Sustainable Development Goals easier to find and synthesize.

"SDG Chat is a service, a chat service, that you can access through any device," said Bjork Sandher, Assistant Secretary‑General at UN DESA. "It uses AI to give you as the user any information that you might be looking for around the sustainable development goals." Sandher said the tool directs users to relevant UN publications, events and reports and synthesizes information so users do not have to search multiple UN sites.

Lan Guan, Chief AI and Data Officer at Accenture, said the partnership pairs UN content and credibility with private‑sector engineering and investment. "UN has a wealth of the information. UN has the mission, for SDG goals. UN also has reputation," she said. "Accenture, we bring technology. We bring talent. We've been investing, $3,000,000,000 in AI technology." Guan described the project as a case of complementary capabilities: UN provides domain knowledge and Accenture provides scale engineering and product development.

Lambert Hongen Hout, chief of data and AI at OICT in the UN Secretariat, said practical deployments such as SDG Chat must be aligned with the broader UN dialogue on AI governance and stress risk mitigation. He said developers built guardrails so the system will acknowledge when a question is out of scope and to keep responses aligned with UN positions. "If somebody asks questions that tend to go off the rails ... we need to make sure that what we say is in line with what the UN knows and says in our position on the SDGs," Hout said.

Panelists described three technical priorities for the project: creating context and domain training so the model behaves like an SDG expert; embedding reliability and truthfulness guardrails so the system admits uncertainty or scope limits; and using a composable architecture that lets UN content be updated independently of the chat interface. Guan said that approach helps keep the knowledge layer current as underlying SDG data and reports change.

When asked about release timing, Sandher said the chat was "not quite available yet," and Accenture and UN speakers said the team was completing final testing. "Days," Guan added, saying the service would be live on the site very soon.

The panelists framed SDG Chat as both a public‑facing information tool and a demonstration of how public‑private partnerships can accelerate access to SDG knowledge. Moderator Martha of the UN Youth Office closed the session by inviting listeners to test and amplify the tool once it goes live.